Introduction

The visual work that anchors this chapter is David Martin's Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray (Fig. 4.1). This picture presents the touching image of the mixed-race Dido and her white cousin enclosed in the grounds of Kenwood House and, at first glance at least, in contrast to the other visual materials discussed so far in this book, appears to have nothing to do with the baleful realities of slavery or the Middle Passage. As it turns out, however, the opposite is the case: Dido was the illegitimate daughter of Captain John Lindsay and an African woman whom, it is thought, Lindsay took from a Spanish slave ship while serving as a naval officer in the Caribbean during the Seven Years’ War. The painting's connection to the slave trade deepens and ramifies when it is recalled that Lindsay was the nephew of Lord Mansfield, who, as well as being Kenwood's owner when the painting was commissioned, had been long established as Lord Chief Justice of England, presiding over a number of important legal cases concerning slavery in the years prior to the abolitionist campaign. The first was that of the fugitive slave James Somerset, which was heard in 1772, and the second that of the Zong, some eleven years later. Portrait of Dido is thus circuitously linked by the latter case to The Slave Ship and has been thoroughly explored in relation to its highly charged historical and political context by a number of critics. The painting has also surfaced amid the realms of popular culture, both providing the inspiration for and featuring in Amma Asante's Belle (2014), a cinematic reworking of Dido's story for a mainstream audience. But as well as giving rise to Asante's film, the picture has prompted a number of ekphrastic responses over the last twenty-five years or so, which have not attracted critical interest. This chapter is devoted to three of these: Leonora Brito's ‘Dido Elizabeth Belle – A Narrative of Her Life (Extant)’ (1995); Emma Donoghue's ‘Dido’ (2002); and, rather more recently, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers's ‘Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, Free Mulatto, and her White Cousin, the Lady Elizabeth Murray, Great-Nieces of William Murray, First Earl of Mansfield and Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench’ (2020).